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The purpose of this paper is to promote governance quality by presenting a school of government model.

To this end, seven schools were selected from among 25 outstanding existing schools of government by purposive sampling. Subsequently, these schools were carefully examined and categorized into primary and support processes through a comparative study and the categorical content analysis approach.

The resulting four primary processes of education, research and agenda-setting, discourse-making and networking, and training and cadre-building, and the five sub-systems of schools of government were extracted. The outputs of the school of government model were classified into the three categories of training cadres experienced in public policy and administration, discourse-making and influencing the environment and theorizing. Finally, the extracted categories were approved by the relevant experts through the fuzzy Delphi method.

This paper can contribute to the training of policymakers and policy researchers, as well as to the establishment, and more effective management, of schools of government.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the history of national education policy through an interview with one of its significant makers and critics, Lyndsay Connors, a former Australian Schools Commissioner.

The paper occurs as an interview. The text is based on a revised conversation held as an event of the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Conference held at the University of Canberra, on 26 September 2017.

Australian educational policy is peculiarly complex, and apparently “irrational”. This appears especially so in relation to the government, tax-raised, funding of government and non-government schools. A combination of the peculiarities of Australian federalism in relation to education, political expediency, popular exhaustion with the “state aid” debate, the power of entrenched interest groups and the distancing of democratic decision making from the decision-making process in relation to education all play a part.

The originality of this contribution to a research journal lies in its combination of autobiography with historical policy analysis.

Until the middle of the 20th Century, all the governments of the various regions in Nigeria did was to give grants‐in‐aid to the voluntary agencies that operated approved schools while a few “government schools” were established in a few strategic towns. After the Nigeria‐Biafra civil war in 1970, some State governments took over the complete ownership and control of all educational institutions in their areas of jurisdiction. The educational policies and practices of the voluntary agencies were condemned as being foreign‐oriented, irrelevant to Nigeria's needs, and divisive in the sense that denominational schools encouraged religious and tribal bigotry and unhealthy rivalry among the citizens. It was also argued that state take‐over of all schools would enable the government to plan the education system as part of the national integrated plan for social and economic development. The author supports greater control of the education system by the government and indeed a state take‐over of voluntary schools based on mutual agreement. However, voluntary agencies and private individuals should be allowed to own and run their own schools completely at their own expense within the broad framework of government regulations. However, many Nigerians objected to the unilateral seizure and control of church and private schools by the government. People argued that it was illegal to dispossess the voluntary agencies of schools they built mostly with their own resources without first of all working out an agreement with them which should include adequate compensation.

This paper aims to trace the evolution of two initiatives – the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative – their genesis, rationale, current form and take‐up rate. It also analyses them as education reforms in terms of policymaking dynamics. The very notion of the term “privatization” will be examined.

The article examines the two school privatization schemes in Hong Kong and Singapore, by putting into perspective a discussion of their policy implications, thereby reflecting on their similarities and differences in their agenda, implementation and implications.

The findings indicate that the DSS and independent school schemes in both Hong Kong and Singapore are in line with the global trends of privatization. It is suggested that the governments of the two places have adopted different approaches in the implementations of their schemes.

The paper shows how the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative represent attempts over the past two decades by the governments of Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively to promote school privatization.

The paper aims to argue that there has been a privileging of the private (social mobility) and economic (social efficiency) purposes of schooling at the expense of the public (democratic equality) purposes of schooling.

The paper employs a literature review, policy and document analysis.

Since the late 1980s, the schooling agenda in Australia has been narrowed to one that gives primacy to purposes of schooling that highlight economic orientations (social efficiency) and private purposes (social mobility).

The findings have wider relevance beyond Australia, as similar policy agendas are evident in many other countries raising the question as to how the shift in purposes of education in those countries might mirror those in Australia.

While earlier writers have examined schooling policies in Australia and noted the implications of managerialism in relation to these policies, no study has analysed these policies from the perspective of the purposes of schooling. Conceptualising schooling, and its purposes in particular, in this way refocuses attention on how societies use their educational systems to promote (or otherwise) the public good.

This chapter looks at the experiments of the Aam Aadmi Party led government’s initiatives in building teacher quality for its government schools in the capital city. Outlining the contours of neoliberal influence on Indian education policy and its consequences on teacher quality, the chapter explores the political rationality that governs the case of Delhi. It does this by understanding the changing subjectivities of the school teachers within the educational reforms. The government schools in Delhi have been blamed for worsening school performance especially in student learning outcomes through basic educational tests conducted by various assessment and evaluation surveys. Among other reasons, poor teacher quality has been identified as one of the major causes of this poor performance of government school children. Therefore, gaps were identified in the teacher support system and efforts were made to revamp the system. The chapter brings out in detail how the state’s initiatives in educational reforms have produced paradoxical situations and unintended effects in practice as the state has retained a controlling role even though the reform strategies show a shift toward increasing autonomy and deregulation.

This paper explores a district government's role in using school networks to transform turnaround schools in rural Shanghai, China.

Qualitative case studies were conducted.

Findings showed that the C District government varied its power in initiating school networks; collaborative networks were developed but addressed local problems in a limited manner and collaborative networks had difficulties innovating to solve novel problems.

This article presents an “external-internal context” framework for understanding local government's role in school networks and turnaround school transformation in China.

The years 1964–1975 saw an unparalleled expansion of the Commonwealth Government's involvement in Australian education at all levels. At the beginning of that decade the Menzies Liberal‐Country Party Government, which had repeatedly asserted that education was a State not a Commonwealth responsibility, was directly involved only in the university sector. Yet by 1975 Federal involvement had been extended to include not only the creation of a Federal Department of Education and Science but also the assumption of broad responsibility for determining the national priorities and levels of funding in the college, school, technical and further education and pre‐school sectors.

This paper is a historical review of the development of private primary and secondary education in Hong Kong from 1841-2012. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolving relationship between the state and private schools in Hong Kong.

This paper utilizes sources from published official documents, public data available on government websites, archival documents and newspapers. The authors also carried out a few individual interviews with legislators, government officials and principals who were familiar with the history of private education in Hong Kong.

The colonial Hong Kong Government adopted laissez-faire policy in greater part of its rule until 1970s. The year 1978 marked the period of “state control” until the 1990s when privatization and deregulation emerged as a world trend in the governance of education. The role of government changed to that of “supervision” instead of “control.” Further, it is shown that the change of sovereignty did not avert the trend of decentralization, deregulation and privatization in education which is entrenched in the management of public affairs in human societies.

The findings provides an illuminating look into the development of a society and how it grapples with the fundamental questions of the degree of social control and proper use of political power in a colonial setting.